Land Utilization in China. A study of 16,786 farms in 169 localities, and 38,256 farm families in twenty-two provinces in China, 1929-1933.

BUCK, John Lossing.

Published by London: Oxford University Press, 1937

About this Item

First edition, British issue. The author was professor of agricultural economics at the University of Nanking and conducted eight years of fieldwork in northern China in the late 1920s and early 1930s. In 1917, already in China, he married the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Pearl Buck. "Many of Buck's recommendations - for improved extension, large conservancy works, and population control - were eventually implemented by the Chinese government, but only after the Communists, whom he detested, had taken power. Buck had placed his hopes on the Nationalist government, whose troubles in the Chinese countryside were of such a different and more serious nature than those of the federal government in rural America that Buck never saw them, despite his accumulation of 'data' from thousands of Chinese farms. A similar inability to see political reality, and how it limited technical agricultural improvements, afflicted the premier Chinese student of American agriculture" (Stross, p. 187). Randall E. Stross, The Stubborn Earth: American Agriculturalists on Chinese Soil, 1898 1937, 1989. Octavo. With 28 plates, tables and figures in text. Original blue cloth, spine lettered in gilt, boards panelled in blind. With substantive remains of dust jacket, now housed in bookseller's sleeve. Cloth lightly rubbed and bumped; jacket not price-clipped and rather brittle, flaps detached, prone to loss through handling: a near-fine copy in very good jacket.

Seller Inventory # 173591

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Land Utilization in China. A study of 16,786 farms in 169 localities, and 38,256 farm families in twenty-two provinces in China, 1929-1933.
• Publisher: London: Oxford University Press, 1937
• Edition: 1st Edition